[ltp] system unresponsive during disk activity

[Marcus Better]

Hi,

my laptop becomes unresponsive whenever some process does a lot of disk I/O,
like when I install or upgrade Debian packages. The other applications
appear to be starved for periods of ten seconds or longer, don't redraw
their windows and don't respond to input.

This is an R60 with 1 GB RAM running kernel 2.6.24-rc6 (x86_64) and KDE. The
problem has been around for a long time with earlier kernels. The file
systems are mostly XFS.

I don't have any reason to assume the problem is Thinkpad-specific but am
not sure where to start looking. My other laptop, an LG i386 with a similar
setup but ext3 instead of XFS does not have this problem - but then it has
3 GB RAM.

Cheers,

Marcus